Tag Archives: cruelty

"Humane", Ableism, Abolitionism, Animal Ethics, Animal Rights, South Florida Vegan Education Group, Speciesism, Vegan, Vegan Education, Veganism, Violence, Welfarism

LANGUAGE MATTERS VOL. 2 – Animals Aren’t “Voiceless”, We’re Just Not Listening

May 5, 2018 Keith Berger 2 Comments

[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimer regarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]

“Look into the faces. Look behind their eyes. They are not ‘voiceless’, they are talking to us with their eyes and their body language; they are screaming, we’re just not listening. Be vegan.” – There’s An Elephant In The Room blog

No-nonsense and No Nonsense

I began writing this essay after spending several hours engaged in peaceful, positive conversations with non-vegans about the ethical reasons for living vegan at an Earth Day event at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida. As always at our Vegan Education Station, we employed no gimmicks, no tricks, no public theatrics, no graphic videos, no gruesome images, no bribery, no shaming, no intrusiveness, no deceptiveness and no coercion in our interactions with our interlocutors (these are all tactics we have observed being employed by animal welfare and animal “rights” organizations that consistently resist the idea of simply educating the public about veganism). Rather, as always, we politely and patiently provided those who approached us with no-nonsense information about the consequences of their choices (that there is always a victim at the end of one’s choice to consume products of animal exploitation) and asked them to think from a perspective many of them admitted they’d never considered before. Our conversations were respectful on both ends, even when we were challenged with the ubiquitous anti-vegan arguments such as “Lions eat other animals – are you gonna tell them to stop?” (“Lions are obligate carnivores and have no choice but to consume flesh – humans, on the other hand, have many other choices”), “But what if I was in an extreme situation and was starving?” (“You’re not experiencing either condition, so what’s stopping you now?”) and “How will I get my protein?” (click here to find out my answer).

Veganism equates to nonviolence and we approach vegan education in a clear, consistent non-threatening manner that is enlightening, effective and generally well-received.

New Kids, Same Block

The caption reads in part: “We had just left Everest Base Camp where we slept for the night, and headed to Mt Kala Patthar to hike to the summit (5,550m)… Within about 6/7 minutes we were hit with a blizzard, temperatures of -5 with wind chill and hard hitting snow, so we had to abandon – but we did manage to speak to 1 couple who took a card!” Yes, when you want a neat photo, try “activism” at 18,000 feet – you’re guaranteed to reach (nearly) no one but you’ll look cool in the process!

In 2016, in what appears to be another in a countless series of attempts to reinvent the animal welfare wheel (one that’s been spinning ceaselessly – and going nowhere – for over 200 years), a group in Melbourne, Australia (now with international membership) calling itself Anonymous for the Voiceless began engaging in what their website describes as “street activism” in which “Cubes of Truth” are formed by individuals wearing Guy Fawkes masks who arrange themselves into a human square and hold laptops or other media devices playing videos depicting the inherent horrors of the animal agriculture industry. I can identify with the idea of wanting to trigger, as their website suggests, “…curiosity and interest from the public” in an “…attempt to lead bystanders to a vegan conclusion through a combination of local standard-practice animal exploitation footage and conversations with a value-based sales approach”, as it’s not much different from the so-called “vegan” outreach in which I used to participate in Miami and other parts of South Florida, although we didn’t wear masks and only had a single video screen playing an endless loop of nauseatingly dreadful animal abuse.

I came to the understanding some time ago that our “vegan” outreach was anything but vegan, as we failed to deliver a clear, consistent message that all animal use is morally unjustifiable and instead offered passersby a confusing combination of vegan and vegetarian messaging through the videos we played and the litter-ature we handed to people whether they wanted it or not.

[It appears that “Cubes of Truth” are being staged in Miami, so it’s possible that the so-called “vegan” outreach mentioned above, soon to be featured in an upcoming essay here at The Turbulence of Dreaming, has morphed into this new version]

Here again is why I no longer believe in, support or engage in speciesist efforts such as these: my ten years of hands-on experience with this kind of activism has led me to the sad conclusion that such messaging, like all animal welfare messaging, misses the point entirely. By focusing our activism on showing the public how awful non-humans are treated in the animal exploitation industries, we fail to make clear that all animal use is inherently unjust and this plays directly into – and tacitly reinforces – a deeply speciesist cultural mindset that as long as we treat non-human individuals “humanely“, “kindly” and “compassionately” while we’re confining them against their wills and forcibly breeding them into existence for the express purpose of violently taking their lives to serve our desires, it’s acceptable in the end to kill them and consume their bodies, skins and secretions because, after all, they’re only “things” and objects to be used, not individuals. By focusing on the symptoms (“cruelty“, “abuse”, “mistreatment”, etc.), we fail to address the problem, and the problem is not how we use animals to serve our own needs; the problem is that we use them at all.

Speaking of problems, here are several problems inherent in Anonymous for the Voiceless:

Problem – Animals Have Voices – We Just Refuse To Listen

“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” – Arundhati Roy

Anonymous for the Voiceless’ implication that non-human individuals don’t have voices is not only incorrect, it’s also ableist. Here’s why.

Consider this from the May 2017 article On Ableism and Animals by Sunaura Taylor:

“The ableism embedded in animal-rights discourse is evident in a common rallying cry used by animal advocates. To be a ‘voice for the voiceless’ is a sentiment with which many activists within advocacy communities identify. It became common to use the biblical phrase ‘a voice for the voiceless’ to refer to animals after the publication of a poem written in 1910 by American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox… this poem was radical in its acknowledgment of animal suffering.

The phrase a ‘voice for the voiceless’–giving voice to a population that is unable to defend or speak for itself–inevitably conjures the sentiment in Wilcox’s poem: that the voiceless are physically unable to speak or help themselves… But [it] is wrong to suggest that animals are not telling us what they want…

Animals consistently voice preferences and ask for freedom. They speak to us every day when they cry out in pain or try to move away from our prods, electrodes, knives, and stun guns. Animals tell us constantly that they want to be out of their cages, that they want to be reunited with their families, or that they don’t want to walk down the kill chute. Animals express themselves all the time, and many of us know it. If we didn’t, factory farms and slaughterhouses would not be designed to constrain any choices an animal might have. We deliberately have to choose not to hear when the lobster bangs on the walls from inside a pot of boiling water or when the hen who is past her egg-laying prime struggles against the human hands that enclose her legs and neck. We have to choose not to recognize the preference expressed when the fish spasms and gasps for oxygen in her last few minutes alive. Considering animals voiceless betrays an ableist assumption of what counts as having a voice.

…When animal advocates describe animals as voiceless, even when it is meant simply as a metaphor, it gives power to those who want to view animals as ‘mindless objects.’ In the long run, activists will help animals more if we treat them as active participants in their own liberation–as the expressive subjects animal advocates know them to be–remembering that resistance takes many forms, some of which may be hard to recognize from an able-bodied human perspective.”

The compelling arguments made in Taylor’s article offer a new perspective on the idea of “a voice for the voiceless”, the very phrase I must admit I’d used to describe myself in the early days of my animal “activism”. Having eloquently explained the ableism inherent in the phrase, Taylor has helped me understand the unsettling feeling I experience whenever I hear animal advocates refer to non-human individuals as “voiceless”. I knew the idea was wrong, but I hadn’t considered that it also carries the weight of oppression.

Problem – Value-Based Selling = Selling Out Our Values

Prior to seeing the term on the Anonymous for the Voiceless website, I was unfamiliar with the idea of a “value-based sales approach”, which is defined as “the process of understanding and reinforcing the reasons why your offer is valuable to the purchaser“. By definition, a value-based sales approach is about catering to the selfishness of the consumer to get them to agree that what you’re proposing will benefit them in some way. Such an approach, in animal advocacy terms, would necessarily put the focus on the ancillary benefits of living vegan (i.e., personal health) and would fail to take into consideration and make primary what matters most – the value to the victims of continuing their lives free from use, commodification, exploitation and execution by humans. To understand why such an approach is problematic from a vegan advocacy perspective, please consider this from a previous essay on this site:

“It can be argued that those who ‘go vegan’ for their own health and personal betterment – which really translates to adopting a plant-based diet, the definition of which is anybody’s guess these days – are essentially acting from the same place of selfishness that had them eating animals and their secretions to satisfy their own pleasure in the first place. When that’s the case, there’s little to stop them from reverting back to their original selfish position of consuming products of animal exploitation (one supported and encouraged by mainstream speciesist society) and resuming their complicity in the violent oppression of non-human individuals, and this happens far too often. Other than an alteration in diet, nothing’s changed for them in any meaningful and fundamental way. There’s been no move from selfishness to selflessness, no firm and unwavering commitment to eschew participation in all forms of animal use and no realization that all of these constitute injustice. Everything is still all about them, and the animal victims of human selfishness remain sadly overlooked.”

Problem – “We Hold An Abolitionist Stance…” But They Don’t

On the Anonymous for the Voiceless website, they loudly proclaim in all caps (like everything else on the page): “WE HOLD AN ABOLITIONIST STANCE ON ANIMAL EXPLOITATION.” As an abolitionist vegan educator, I found this statement intriguing so I sought to find out whether their assertion holds up when put in the Reality Machine.

Related image — Brain + critical thinking = Reality Machine

Here’s what I found with a minimum of investigation:

In a 2016 interview with Freedom of Species (a podcast website that features a mix of single-issue animal welfare campaigns and unequivocal vegan campaigns) Paul Bashir, co-founder and director of Anonymous For The Voiceless, is asked about the organization’s “abolitionist position” and has this to say about a “baby steps” approach to veganism, which would be in direct opposition to the abolitionist approach (I’ve italicized some notable quotes in the passage):

“We would never behave that way [promote incremental baby-step reduction efforts] in the face of any other injustice and therefore it is totally an injustice to expect that…in respect to veganism”.

He then draws analogies to human oppression and states that:

“Humans are animals and therefore the cruelty that we inflict on animals needs to be considered equally to the cruelty that’s inflicted on humans… it is just as serious and it’s just as problematic and it’s just as much of an injustice, therefore, no, nobody should be cutting back, everybody should be realizing that this is outright insanity and we all need to just stop. I refuse to compromise on that, on our values. No science or any sort of rational experiment has ever compelled me, that I’ve ever come across, to believe that ‘baby steps’ works, that it gets people to go full-blown vegan… since we would never compromise on those other injustices that occur within our own species, we shouldn’t be doing that with non-humans.”

I will say that I’m in agreement with Bashir’s assertion that asking non-vegans to take baby steps toward living vegan is unacceptable, though I find the focus on “cruelty” to be problematic as I mentioned previously.

Problem – Organizational Speciesism

If Bashir, the group’s co-founder and director, truly believes that “nobody should be cutting back” and is honest when he says, “I refuse to compromise on that, on our values” and so on, then one has to wonder how it came to pass that rather than adopting a stance of unequivocally promoting veganism, Anonymous for the Voiceless instead prominently promotes on their website a three-week dietary “challenge” that, in addition to erroneously positioning veganism as a mere diet and something challenging to achieve, clearly promotes a baby-steps approach. One needs only click the handy link to the Challenge22 (“Let’s try vegan!”) website to find that the FAQ page states that friends and families of those already vegan “…don’t have to commit to being vegan for life, just agree to give it a try for 22 days.” In fact, that appears to be all they ask of anyone as they offer “participants a free, supportive online framework for trying veganism for 22 days.” The Challenge22 focus is clearly on “trying”, not committing to, a diet and lifestyle (as opposed to the ethical position that veganism is – “a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose…” – Vegan Society 1979) as the participants have access to “culinary experts” and “certified dietitians who give nutritional advice” so that they will be “equipped with nutritional information, cooking tips and recipes that enable them to maintain a healthy, tasty vegan lifestyle.” There is no mention of abstaining from any of the other myriad forms of animal use nor any mention or indication of veganism as one’s personal commitment to justice and nonviolence toward non-human individuals. One can only conclude from the information they provide that Challenge22 is far more committed to maintaining speciesism than it is to dismantling it through veganism. They’re not “trying” to promote speciesism – they’re promoting it.

To understand why this is speciesist, one need only frame it in human terms – imagine an anti-spousal abuse organization promoting a platform for spousal abusers to take a few weeks vacation from beating their partners but not have to commit to such a drastic lifestyle change permanently. Hard to imagine? It ought to be, much as it should be hard to imagine that an organization seeking to create a vegan world would promote anything less than living vegan as far as possible and practicable, and yet Challenge22 is doing exactly that.

Here’s a 2017 quote from Bashir’s Deskgram page chronicling one interaction he’d had:

“They couldn’t believe how young animals were slaughtered in the meat, dairy and egg industries. They were disgusted by the standard practices in free range farming. They despised animal cruelty, like most people; and after 10 minutes of chatting they realized there was no way you can be a non-vegan and truly represent those values. I told them about Challenge22+ and they said they’d do it. Why and how. In that order.”

I won’t belabor the aforementioned point about why focusing on the specifics of animal “cruelty” makes no sense from an abolitionist animal rights perspective, however I will point out that helping people realize they need to live vegan and then immediately directing them to a website that only asks people to “TRY vegan!” for 22 days is morally inconsistent. “Give it a shot for a few weeks and see what you think” is not a clear vegan message. It lets people off the moral hook and that’s unacceptable. Bashir seems to agree with this concept and yet, puzzlingly, this is his tactic and that of his organization.

Is it possible that Anonymous for the Voiceless simply hasn’t found an online vegan resource that does better than asking non-vegans to become 3-week plant-based dieters?

“Get 22 days of full support: Challenge22.com” – Paul Bashir

I find it perplexing that Anonymous for the Voiceless, while claiming to be “abolitionist”, would promote organizations that equivocate about or entirely avoid the idea of veganism as a moral imperative… and allow their organizers to be similarly noncommittal:

In a January 2017 article in the Guardian, Matt Stellino, an Anonymous for the Voiceless co-organizer in Sydney Australia, comes across like someone who is as serious as anyone could be about wanting people to live vegan and yet, at the end of the article, the equivocation comes: “The kebab shop doesn’t have to close,” Stellino offers. “We just want falafels for everyone.” That’s not asking for veganism. That’s asking for plant-based options and, contrary to what some vegans assert, offering plant-based foods to non-vegans is not getting us closer to dismantling speciesism and ending animal use. It merely adds more choices to the menu and further identifies veganism solely as a dietary option.

Problem – It Sounds Good, But What Does It Mean?

Every so often in the animal welfare sphere, a new organization arises promising a fresh and exciting “new” approach to “saving” or “sparing” animals, usually asking for volunteers to recruit members and needing large amounts of donations. If this sounds suspiciously like the modus operandi of a multi-level marketing scam, there’s a good reason for that… Notice that with such organizations the math involved in calculating the amount of “saved” or “spared” animals is always very fuzzy, but the math involved in calculating the amount of money needed in donations is always very clear. I’m not sure whether Anonymous for the Voiceless is on the same level as the large, donation-based animal welfare corporations (yet), but I am curious about the math I’ve seen posted by them on various sites: “125,253 bystanders taking veganism/animal liberation seriously!”, “32,851 conversions!” What exactly does it mean to “take veganism seriously” and at what point in the conversation does that become clear? Does it mean they will start living vegan from that moment or is it just something now being considered by someone who hadn’t previously given it much, or any, thought? And at what point in the conversation is a “conversion” recorded? These seem like intangibles to me and the statistics carry more than a whiff of self-justification and marketing.

New Doesn’t Always Mean Better

It’s easy to be lured in by the shine and flash of the new, especially to those who see the injustice of animal use and feel a desperate desire to “do something“, but we need always remember the following:

A disease is not cured by merely exposing and treating its symptoms but rather by directly addressing the root cause that creates the symptoms. This compelling essay from Gentle World entitled Are Anti-Cruelty Campaigns Really Effective? discusses the matter eloquently. An excerpt:

“…a united front of widespread public education focused on why and how to become vegan would address the root of the exploitation problem by challenging not only all of our uses of animals, but our society’s decidedly speciesist attitude in and of itself.

To illustrate the point, it’s helpful to consider the analogy of a tree. The animal exploitation tree can be divided into several sections, including the roots, trunk, and branches.

The roots of the tree – mostly hidden underground – represent our society’s underlying speciesism; the cultural prejudice against all animals (other than humans) that makes it possible for us to ignore the basic needs of others in favor of our own trivial desires. Speciesism, like racism, sexism, and other oppressive cultural prejudices, ignores morally relevant characteristics (such as the fundamental interests of the oppressed or exploited), in favor of morally irrelevant characteristics (such as membership of a species, race, sex, and so on). When we eliminate speciesism (individually or as a group), we respect the interests of individual members of other species sufficiently to take those interests into account with our own, and everyone else’s interests. The behavioral result of such respect is veganism – avoiding animal products and uses in our lives as much as is reasonably possible.”

It makes no sense, is counterproductive and is unethical to engage in one or more forms of violent, systematic, exploitative oppression while working to end another. It is particularly counterproductive to engage in the same form of exploitation – in the case of Anonymous for the Voiceless, speciesism – one is trying to end.

And The Reality Machine Says…

By applying critical thinking rather than taking everything at face value and accepting words that don’t match actions, it becomes clear that Anonymous for the Voiceless is, sadly, not only engaging in ableism by portraying non-human individuals as “voiceless” but also promoting speciesism through their focus on animal “cruelty” and their affiliation with speciesist organizations such as Challenge22.

Therefore, while it seems to me that Mr. Bashir is a committed animal activist and appears to want to help end all animal exploitation, the organization he’s co-founded has unfortunately strayed from their stated “abolitionist stance” and landed deeply in animal welfare territory.

The Simple Solution – Vegan Education

If you oppose at least one form of violent oppression because you recognize it is morally wrong, then to live in integrity requires opposing all forms of violent oppression because they are all morally wrong. Speciesism, simply by virtue of having the largest number of victims and the highest ever-increasing death toll worldwide, is the most egregious form of violent oppression our world has ever known. It’s time to dismantle speciesism, and the way to do that, again, is through living vegan and educating others to live vegan.

Animals are not voiceless and truth doesn’t come in cubes. There are no masks or laptops required to educate others about veganism. If you want to dismantle and end speciesism, carry the vegan message of nonviolence and justice for non-humans by speaking your truth clearly, consistently and directly with words, not theatrics. Provide the public with the simple, logical idea that when you realize it’s wrong to hurt, steal from and kill vulnerable individuals for your personal pleasure and satisfaction, the only rational and just response is to live vegan.

[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimer regarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]

Dismantle speciesism. Live vegan. Educate others.

Start now, here’s how:

HowToGoVegan.org

VeganEducationGroup.com

BeFairBeVegan.com

"Humane", Abolitionism, Animal Ethics, Animal Rights, Cognitive dissonance, Dairy, Eggs, Racism, South Florida Vegan Education Group, Speciesism, Vegan, Vegan Education, Veganism, Violence, Welfarism

Yes, “Cruelty” is the Problem, But Not In the Way You Might Be Thinking

September 2, 2016 Keith Berger 1 Comment

[Updated 8/8/2017]

If you’re of the opinion that we need to hammer home the gruesome details of animal “cruelty” in order to be effective in our vegan advocacy, I’d like to offer a different opinion.

Taking the road less traveled

On August 14, 2016 at the Fort Lauderdale Animal Adoption Fair, a young man named Celso approached me at the SFVEG Vegan Education Station and asked,

“So, can you educate me?” I said, “Sure! What would you like me to educate you about?” He replied, “Dairy” and, rather than launching into a blood-and-guts crash course about the horrors of the dairy industry, I asked him, “Why don’t you tell me what you think you know about dairy production?” He began to explain to me, quite accurately, about some of those horrors, indicating he was already aware of the standard abuses inherent in dairy production and went on to tell me he was still unwilling to give up consuming dairy due to “personal pleasure preferences” (his term). This indicated to me that he was unmoved by what he already knew about the “cruelty” he was supporting and was able to compartmentalize this knowledge and justify that it wasn’t an important situation he needed to address and take a stand against – just as countless other non-vegans do every single day. Does this make him a “bad” person, a sociopath or a psychopath? No, at least not by that benchmark. This makes him “normal” by society’s standards… and it also makes him reachable.

eb1 — SFVEG Vegan Education Station – Fort Lauderdale Animal Adoption Fair 8/14/16

This is the point in many conversations between vegans and non-vegans where vegans will dig their heels in and try to drive the “cruelty” argument deeper, sharing gory details and horrific stories, often backing these up with graphic images and terrifying videos while overlooking the reality that this person already knows and hasn’t stopped despite that knowledge, so heading down that path will likely be ineffective. Many times in many conversations when I used the approach of, “I know you think you know, but you really have no idea – here, let me show you what’s really going on”, I’m met with a dismissive “I don’t wanna know” and it’s game over. It’s very hard to win someone back when they’ve been driven away, and I feel we need to engage, not outrage, those we wish to educate about veganism. Here’s how I reached Celso:

I validated that what he knew about dairy was accurate and briefly touched on a couple of pieces he didn’t know (the fate of dairy calves and their permanent separation from their mothers shortly after birth) but I quickly steered the conversation to animal use rather than abuse to refocus on justice. I guided him to find his own answers by helping him make the ethical connection between veganism and fundamental justice. I could see the switches switch and the light go on when I pointed to a nearby person and asked Celso, “If that person had something you wanted because it would give you pleasure, would it be ok for you to just take it from her?” He answered, “No”. I asked whether it would be ok to take her children from her and he answered, “No” again. I explained that the only difference between the woman in question and a non-human individual is an arbitrary distinction based on species membership and that these situations represent equal injustices for both groups. By the end of our conversation (15 minutes or less), he had fist-bumped me twice and thanked me three times “for educating me and taking the time to give me information that is more valuable than I can tell you”. I gave him information to take with him that will help reinforce our conversation. Another new vegan is born through clear, consistent vegan education!

Changing the conversation

When we talk about “cruelty”, the conversation becomes about treatment and abuse, rather than use which ultimately is the issue that needs addressing. I stay away from the word “cruelty” in my vegan advocacy for the simple reason that people will define the word in whatever way they see fit in order to justify their continued use of products of animal exploitation. One person’s definition of “cruelty” often differs from the next, which leads to the ideas of “humane” treatment, “humane” slaughter, “free range” and other fantasies the animal agriculture marketing machine foists on the public as some sort of reality.

htgv — HowToGoVegan.org – A Comprehensive Vegan Podcast

From the episode entitled “Humane”: What’s In a Word? on the excellent podcast site How To Go Vegan:

“We tend to only talk about ‘humane’ in relation to humans when we talk about imprisonment, euthanasia, solitary confinement, detention, or killing people. When we hear the word ‘humane’, we should expect that the outcome for those involved will, no matter what transpires, be less than desirable and will involve some suffering and injustice at best. In the case of sentient animals, our application of what we believe is ‘humane’ for them, if applied to humans, would be considered torture. In other words, any time that word humane is uttered, it’s almost always the case that something morally questionable and possibly unjust is going to follow, whether it’s execution, refugees, interrogation techniques, asylum seeker detention centres, industrial prisons, or in this case, the animal industry and regulation of animal exploitation. We know that it will ultimately mean suffering for someone.”

I can’t count the number of times people have said to me, “As long as the animals are slaughtered ‘humanely’, I have no problem eating them, but some of what I’ve seen in those videos is really cruel, so we should at least stop that“, strongly indicating they believe there are acceptable levels of what some might call “cruelty”. This plays directly into animal welfare campaigns such as Whole Foods’ “5-STEP® ANIMAL WELFARE RATING – Your way of knowing how the animals were raised for the meat you are buying”, which reinforces the “acceptable cruelty” idea and the myth that there is such a thing as “humane” slaughter. When I make the statement to a non-vegan that it is morally unjustifiable to use any sentient individual, be they human or non-human, as a disposable, replaceable commodity/thing/resource for someone else’s pleasure, entertainment, comfort or convenience, (which covers about 99.9% of all animal use by humans) and demonstrate that this is analogous to racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression in which one group dominates, devalues and disenfranchises another to the benefit of the victimizers and the detriment of the victims, they seem to grasp and understand the idea quickly and clearly. When I further explain to non-vegans that if they believe these forms of oppression are wrong and don’t support them when the victims are humans, they are demonstrating a lack of integrity – and engaging in speciesism – by supporting the same oppressions when the victims are non-human, they begin to understand that to live in integrity is to live vegan.

I believe the word “cruelty” is too broad and subjective a word to use in a vegan advocacy context and therefore causes unnecessary confusion. When lives are at stake, which they are here by the trillions, I feel we all need to be as clear and consistent as possible in conveying the message of veganism so we maximize the impact we desire to make while using the least amount of time, energy and resources as possible.

A word from our President

Elena Brodskaya, co-founder and President of South Florida Vegan Education Group says:

“Talking about cruelty in one’s advocacy is irrelevant because it is synced to emotion, a dangerous territory evoking words like ‘compassion’ and ‘kindness’ in its wake. An emotional approach has never helped the animals (nor people, for that matter) and never turned anyone vegan, including myself. Animal rights are about justice, not compassion. Compassionate people who oppose cruelty are the ones who will sooner donate to a welfare organization than make the connection and change their belief system. ‘Cruelty’ implies that we ‘need to do something’ to better the industry practices and not go vegan in order to abolish the industry altogether. Just yesterday I was witness to someone who said he will never, ever go vegan because it’s not a moral issue, however he agrees that we shouldn’t treat animals with cruelty. Such a backward stance in one’s morals indicates that as Animal Rights Advocates we are not focused on full abolition, but just on eliminating cruelty, thus subliminally giving a green light to everyone to still kill and eat flesh and rape juice. Abolition seeks to eliminate the use of animals, not to treat them nicely until they are killed.“

The operative words in unequivocal vegan advocacy should not be “cruel” and “cruelty” but “unjust” and “injustice”. Even if the non-consensual uses of vulnerable individuals in question were devoid of discomfort and injury, they remain unjust. This is why veganism is indeed a social justice movement and not, as it is often mislabeled, a diet, lifestyle, trend or cult.

Experience matters

Drawing from my own experiences, I will say that it was a combination of logic and emotion that compelled me to start living vegan: I saw horrific atrocities in a semi-graphic video depicting animal abuse on factory farms —> I realized my complicity in said atrocities —> I realized that I don’t support human slavery, so it makes no sense for me to continue supporting non-human slavery now that I know this is what I’m doing, and I began living vegan right then and there. The entire experience occurred over 70 minutes, but the logical piece took mere seconds: “This is slavery… I don’t support slavery… I’m done.”

From there, I firmly believed that any and every person to whom I showed the same video would begin living vegan immediately afterward, just as I had, because they would have the same emotional/logical response to the information that I’d had. I mean, how couldn’t they, right?

Wrong.

Here’s the empirical evidence from my experience: not one person I showed the video to (without any accompanying education) decided to live vegan. Not one. In fact, to my knowledge, none of them have changed anything about their attitudes and habits when it comes to animal exploitation. The appeal to emotion simply didn’t cut it, as each person comes from their own perspective on what’s “cruel” and what’s “not so bad”, and what’s unacceptable to one person is acceptable to another.

For the next ten years, fueled mainly by my emotional response to what I’d seen, the focus of my advocacy efforts was on anti-cruelty campaigns and I missed many opportunities to engage the public in direct, honest, unequivocal vegan education because such campaigns, by their very design, avoid focusing on veganism. When I finally came to understand how ineffective, counterproductive and speciesist these campaigns and the organizations that create them are, my focus shifted to where it would have been best all along.

[A brief side note on the use of graphic imagery in vegan advocacy: “Cruelty” videos and images are certainly compelling and can drive people to action, but humans have built-in forgetters for trauma, so those images and the feelings they elicit in those moments can and often do fade… and when they fade, there’s not much to stop them from going back to consuming non-human animals and their secretions unless they’ve come to believe that it is fundamentally morally unjust to use non-human animals for one’s pleasure. Once a person understands that it’s our moral obligation to not treat individuals of other species as human property and that to do so is to engage in and support slavery, there’s an internal shift that generally doesn’t un-shift. Conversely, when people convince themselves that somehow, somewhere, things in the animal agriculture industry are nicer than the graphic images they’ve been shown (which they may believe are anomalies at the extreme end of the “cruelty spectrum”), they will seek out “humane” animal products. “The reason that cruelty videos can be detrimental to an animal rights organization’s mission is that such videos inherently focus on treatment, not use, even though the cruel treatment is an inevitable symptom of the disease of use. By focusing on treatment, such videos do not suggest that use ought to end, but that use ought to be regulated.” – UVE Archives, On Cruelty Videos ]

In my experience, the logical appeal is a different story with a different ending . Most people have at least a rudimentary understanding (if not more) that something horrific has to happen for a vibrant, living individual to end up drained of blood and life and cut into pieces to be eaten, and yet they continue to consume these individuals with no apparent emotional distress (when confronted with this in my pre-vegan days, I used to rationalize “This cow’s already dead, so what’s the problem?” and devour my steak, etc.). When individuals are presented with the simple, logical question “Do you believe it’s wrong to cause unnecessary suffering and death to animals for reasons of pleasure, entertainment, comfort or convenience?” (almost all will agree that this is wrong) and then informed that these uses, which are tantamount to slavery (something they would never support were the enslaved individuals human), account for nearly 100% of our society’s animal use, they get the point fairly quickly and start to understand the issue on a level deeper than fleeting emotion.

When we focus on specific cruelties and treatment, this leads to more campaigns for animal welfare rather than the abolition of animal use and a call to justice.

One need only look at the past 200+ years of animal welfare and the infinitesimal “gains” that have been made at that glacial pace (if the fact that more animals are dying in more horrific ways at the hands of humans than ever before in human history can be called a “gain”) to see that the welfare approach to harm reduction simply isn’t going to achieve the goal of ending animal use. One need only look at the large, donation-based animal welfare organizations and the verbiage they use, even in their names – mercy, compassion, treatment, cruelty, humane – to see how such words again lead down the road to welfare and harm reduction rather than to justice and an end to use.

All of these organizations appeal to emotions with undercover videos, exposés of “cruelty” and so on, and claim “victory” whenever they and some animal exploiters join forces to compromise on a supposed “improvement” in conditions for those they enslave, i.e.: going “cage-free” nine years down the road. That may arguably reduce the “cruelty”, but it doesn’t lead toward the necessary paradigm shift to abolish the property status of animals. Rather, the idea that it’s ok to use animals so long as it’s done “less cruelly” is reinforced and driven deeper into the public psyche.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

If the change we wish to see is merely harm reduction, then appeals to emotion will certainly achieve that limited goal, as history has taught us since this has been the case for as long as animal welfare campaigns have been happening (two centuries and counting is a long time to keep advocating for incremental changes).

If our goal is to change the current paradigm so that non-humans cease to be treated as disposable objects for humans to use, then we must appeal to people’s sense of justice through clear, consistent education focusing on veganism as the moral baseline for our treatment of individuals of other species.

Tugging at heartstrings, while effective on some levels, is ultimately a manipulative device. Solid, direct vegan education is a much more honest approach that leads to a deep and lasting change.

The bottom line needs to be that if we believe it’s wrong/morally unjustifiable to cause unnecessary suffering and death to non-humans for reasons of pleasure, entertainment, comfort and convenience (I frequently remind non-vegans that even the “kindest” slave owner is still a slave owner), then the right thing to do – the morally just thing to do – is to start living vegan and stop being complicit in all forms of animal exploitation, not just the ones some people define as “cruel”. Not everyone agrees on what constitutes cruelty and many people see it as a matter of degrees (horribly cruel, really cruel, somewhat cruel, kinda cruel, not all that cruel so therefore acceptable), and this leads to “humane” this and “cage-free” that and we’re right back to the oumoded, counterproductive 19th-century animal welfare model.

Humans have an uncanny ability to turn off and/or compartmentalize their emotions whenever those emotions run counter to them getting their desires met, whether it be in the consumption of animal products, or rape, or war, or most any violent act. Unless one is socio- or psychopathic (or severely cognitively impaired), everyone knows all those acts of violence constitute “cruelty”, and yet they continue to happen because humans find ways to minimize, justify, rationalize and deny the consequences of their actions to suit their perceived “needs”.

Logic over emotion

Here’s an unflinchingly honest account of one person’s commitment to the ethical principles of veganism, from my friend and fellow vegan advocate Andy Williams:

“Emotions are fickle things. If one bases their actions on an emotion, those actions will change when the the emotion fades. Think back to your first love. Think of how strong those emotions were. Are you still in love with that person? How many people stay with their first love their entire lives?

Sadly, I’ve seen so many people enter into the world of veganism all fired up and filled with enthusiasm. These people had a true feeling of concern, based on their emotional reaction to the plight of animals. They were charged up. They were going to change the world! However, once the practical implications set in, many found it difficult to maintain their original vigor. Eventually, one discovers that you actually have to exert a small amount of effort in the process of obtaining your daily food. One discovers that you can no longer purchase your favorite and familiar products. One discovers that friends and family will do everything possible to shun you and discourage your actions. These setbacks have an enormous emotional impact, and many times this is where the cracks start to form.

A person beset with a whirlwind of mixed emotion has no choice but to start bargaining. Something inevitably has to go. Will it be the comfort of friends and family? Will it be the convenience of brain-dead living? Or will it be this new flame? In far too many cases, I’ve seen an untempered leap into veganism eventually melt into mere welfarism. “I really care about these animals, so I’m only going to eat cage free eggs” and “it’s a step in the right direction at least”, and all of the other rationalizations that I’m sure you’ve heard countless times. People can satisfy their cloying emotional states by taking actions that offer little to no material relief to the animals that they claim to carry so much concern for.

Without the clear understanding of basic concepts like justice and autonomy, then anything goes. Conversely, when one internalizes the fact that any and all use of animals by humans is wrong, then nothing can shake that foundation.

I myself suffered enormously when first going vegan. I was still living at home. My parents saw my decision as a fundamental attack against everything they believed in. One day, I came home to find the locks changed and all of my possessions on the porch. I was shocked. I really had nowhere to go. I had nowhere to store my belongings. I lost everything. I had to drop out of school. I became homeless. This was an extremely emotionally devastating experience, but even then, I knew that our actions toward non-human animals should not be based on emotion, but on logical principles. Animals deserve justice regardless of how it affects us emotionally, and regardless of how difficult it may be. I was looking at death straight in the face and never compromised an inch. I can’t say the same for all the sad souls who have come and gone because they did not understand that all use is abuse and our own personal circumstances should not dictate our actions toward animals.”

Like it or not, each of us has a finite amount of time, energy and resources to spend on our advocacy efforts. Let’s employ those resources in the most effective way we can by engaging in direct, honest vegan education focusing on the fact that all animal use for human gain is exploitative no matter the perceived level of “cruelty” in any particular form of use. Let’s stay away from confusing words like “cruelty”, “humane”, “treatment” and “abuse” and remember that what we’re working for are justice and an end to use.

Keith Berger and Elena Brodskaya – co-founders, SFVEG